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Journal Policies and Ethics

In order to ensure maximum reach of Journal of Biological Control(JBC) contents, we have adopted the open access policy, meaning that;

All the articles published in JBC are made freely accessible online immediately after publication in an easily readable format, without any subscription or registration barrier.

All the published articles are licensed under a Creative Commons license. Articles can be shared and adapted, provided the attribution for the work is given.

II Peer-review Policy

All the manuscripts submitted to JBC will be subjected to double blinded peer review process;

The manuscript will be reviewed by two suitable experts in respective subject area.

The reports of both the reviewers will be considered while deciding on acceptance/revision or rejection of a manuscript.

Editor-In-Chief will make the final decision, based on reviewer's comments.

Editor-In-Chief can ask the one or more advisory board members for their suggestions upon a manuscript, before making the final decision.

Associate editor and review editors provide the administrative support to maintain the integrity of peer review process.

In case, authors challenge editor's negative decision with suitable arguments, the manuscript can be sent to one more reviewer and the final decision will be made based upon his recommendations.

III Licensing Policy

To fully realise the potential of open access to research literature, barriers to reuse need to be removed. The Creative Commons (CC) licenses have emerged as an effective legal instrument to achieve this. Instead of transferring rights exclusively to publishers (the approach usually followed in subscription publishing), authors grant a non-exclusive license to the publisher to distribute the work, and all users and readers are granted rights to reuse the work.

CC-BY allows for unrestricted reuse of content, subject only to the requirement that the source work is appropriately attributed. The CC-BY license thereby requires that authors are given appropriate credit for their work, as explained in a recent post from Creative Commons wiki.creativecommons.org/BIS_committee_UK_OA_Policy.

IV Archiving Policy

This journal utilizes the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration.

PUBLICATION ETHICS

The JBC is an electronic Double Blind peer reviewed journal upholding the highest standards. Articles not in accordance with publication ethics and malpractices will be removed from publication if detected at any time. Plagiarism and research fabrication such as making up of data, manipulation of existing data, tables etc. and ethical clearance on the use of humans or animals for the study will also be checked. The journal reserves the right to use plagiarism detecting software to screen submitted papers at any time and suspected plagiarism or duplicate publishing will be reported immediately.

I Authors Responsibility

They must ensure that

Their work is original

Must not have been published elsewhere

Other authors, contributors or sources should be appropriately credited

They are responsible for language editing before submission

Their work has not been copied or plagiarized in whole or part from any other work

The financial support and conflict of interest for the project/research work if any should be disclosed

They are obliged to notify the editor if any error or inaccuracy is discovered and co-operate with the editor to correct the same

Articles should be submitted using online procedures. Simultaneous publication in more than one publication is a breach of publication ethics.

Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) during the 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity in Singapore in 2010 has developed the below mentioned guidelines. Informatics Journals, as a publisher follows COPE, WAME and has adopted COPE’s best practice guidelines for dealing with ethical issues in a journal. The Journal Members (Advisory Board, editors and the journal manager) have consented to adopt the COPE as it meets the purpose and objective of the Journal.

The following is a summary of COPE’s international standards for authors of scholarly research publications and describes responsible research reporting practice. The comprehensive guidelines can be downloaded here

The Research being reported should have been conducted in an ethical and responsible manner and should comply with all relevant legislation.

Researchers should present their results clearly, honestly, and without fabrication, falsification or inappropriate data manipulation.

Researchers should strive to describe their methods clearly and unambiguously so that their findings can be confirmed by others.

Researchers should adhere to publication requirements that submitted work is original, is not plagiarised, and has not been published elsewhere.

Authors should take collective responsibility for submitted and published work.

The authorship of research publications should accurately reflect individuals’ contributions to the work and its reporting.

Funding sources and relevant conflicts of interest should be disclosed.

They will strive to prevent any conflict of interest between the author and editorial and review personnel

All the information related to the submitted manuscript is kept confidential prior to publishing

III Reviewers Responsibility

They must ensure that

Reviews of the manuscript is completed and provides suitable comments for improvement

Promptness in notifying the editor about his inability to review the manuscript

Maintains confidentiality about the manuscript obtained for review, by not discussing with others

Standards of Objectivity preserved by reviewing the manuscripts objectively with clear views and supporting arguments and without any personal criticism

Acknowledgement of Sources

All References not cited by author should be removed. All citations should be accompanied with any previously reported observation, derivation or argument.

The editors should be intimated for any overlap of the reviewed manuscript with any other published paper.

Disclosures and Conflict of Interest - manuscripts having conflict of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative or any other relationships or connections with institutions connected to the paper will not be considered.

IV Manuscript Withdrawal Policy

Authors must abide by these policies after submission of their manuscript.

Authors must provide their consent to publish their manuscript prior to peer-review process. Withdrawing an already confirmed manuscript after it has been accepted would attract a minimal article handling charge.

If the author withdraws the article after acceptance of the manuscript and payment has also been made, there will be NO REFUND of the Article Processing Charge (APC) already paid.

If a Manuscript is withdrawn over indexing issues, NO REFUND will be made.

V Waiver Policy

JBC may grant the partial/full waiver in article processing charges to those authors who are unable to pay the APCs due to financial crisis.

All the articles published in JBC are distributed under a creative commons license. The journal allows the author(s) to hold the copyright of their work.For Informatics Journals to Publish and Disseminate research articles, we require the Publishing Rights. This can be done by a Transfer of Copyright or Licensing the copyright to Informatics Publishing Limited, authors retain the rights to share and use their work.

VII Disclaimer

The author(s) of each article appearing in this Journal is/are solely responsible for the content thereof; neither the JBC nor its editors or publisher or anyone else involved in creating, producing or distribution assumes any liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information provided in the Journal, nor shall they be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages arising out of the use of JBC.

VIII Plagiarism:

For every Journal, the peer review process is at the heart of the success of publishing. As part of our commitment to the protection and enhancement of the peer review process, The JBC would like to ensure that all published articles are within the accepted level of plagiarism. The Journal uses the very well and widely accepted Plagiarism Detection tool, iThenticate. All submitted Manuscripts are first subjected to Plagiarism check and then the Publishing cycle begins.

In case, plagiarism is detected during review/editorial process, such manuscript(s) will be rejected immediately and we can also consider other steps depending upon the seriousness of the case. If the plagiarism is proven after publication, such manuscript(s) will be removed from our website and appropriate announcement will be placed in this regards. Further, "JBC" can bring such instances in notice of author's funding agencies, author's institutes (where they work) and to the original authors whose work has been plagiarized. Please report the plagiarism toeditor2@informaticsglobal.com

IX Corrections and Retraction Policy

Article Withdrawal

Either the Publisher or the author of the article can withdraw the same. An article can be withdrawn at any point in time before it is formally published online in its final form with complete information about volume, issue, page numbers, DOI and article ID. If the article withdrawal request has been initiated by an author, they need to submit a signed letter to the Editorial Office prior to article withdrawal. Publisher can withdraw an article if it is found to violate the ethical publishing guidelines, like Duplicate publication, Plagiarism, Fraudulent usage of data, Multiple Submissions, Bogus claims of authorship. In both the cases, the article PDF will be removed and a note that the article has been withdrawn will be displayed

Corrections to an Article

If an error is discovered in an already published article, Erratum, Corrigendum or Addendum will be published in an issue once the proposed changes are in agreement with Publisher and Author. Only significant corrections will be published such as – Inaccurately published information etc. Minor corrections like spelling mistakes or grammatical errors which do not alter the understanding of the paper will not be corrected. When a correction is published, the original article reference will be given in the corrected PDF and vice-versa. Only the corrections will be mentioned. Charges will be decided while corrections are made depending on the number of corrections etc.

Original article will not be modified, but correction link will be available on the article page. This will help readers to download both the PDFs.

An Errata will be published only when mistakes are recognized in the published article which went unnoticed during Editing and Layout setting in Figures, Tables etc.

Corrigenda is published when authors realise that errors in the published article could affect the validity of the scientific content, or its accuracy. If a reader detects an error in a published article, they can submit the same as a letter to the editor. The author, editor and a reviewer would then assess the validity of the error pointed out. Corrigenda will then be published with reference to the letter and the answers provided by the author. Addenda is published if authors have omitted a significant information inadvertently during manuscript submission and would like to add this content to the article after publication. The information provided for addendum will undergo peer-review prior to editorial acceptance.

Addendum publication is very rare and will be allowed by Editorial team only if the information is very much essential to understand a significant portion of the published article.

Article Retractions

Retractions are published in circumstances like, if the conclusions of a paper is found to be based on faulty logic or computation by new information made available after the paper has been published; if the paper is based on falsified or fabricated data, if plagiarized data has been published or if duplicate publications exist. The retractions are decided on a case by case basis by the editor in consultation with the authors and the reviewers of the article. A signed statement from the authors will be required to be submitted to the Editorial Office before an article can be retracted. Agreement of all authors of a paper is required before a retraction can be published. If some co-authors do not agree to the retraction of the article, the retraction will be published as decided by the editor, clearly identifying the dissenting co-authors. When a retraction is published it will be linked to the article being corrected and a link to the retractions page will also be placed on the article published earlier. On the webpages of the retracted article the bibliographic information will be retained on all the pages, however, the article text will be replaced by a note stating that the article has been retracted from the journal. The PDF version of the article will be retained to preserve the integrity of record, but will be marked to show that the article has been retracted. In cases of partial retractions, the retraction notice will be labeled as 'Partial Retraction' or 'Retraction in Part'.

Article Removal

In exceptional circumstances an article may be removed from the journal. This may happen if any legal issues arise or are expected to arise in context of the article, the distribution of the article is stopped by an court order, the contents of the article may pose a serious health risk if acted upon by others, the article violates copyright of others, or if the article is found to be defamatory or infringing on other's legal rights. When an article is removed from the journal the bibliographic information and the PDF file will also be removed. The article text will be replaced by a note stating that the article has been removed from the journal and the reason for removal.

Article Replacement

If an article is found to contain false or inaccurate data which may pose a serious health risk if acted upon by others, the authors of the original article may wish to retract the article and replace it with a corrected version. In this case, the article will be retracted, following the procedure of retraction of an article, with the difference that a link to the corrected re-published article will be placed on the HTML and PDF versions of the paper and on the page with the retraction notice.

X Human and Animal Rights

While reporting experiments on human subjects, you should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional or regional) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975 that was revised in 2000. http://www.wma.net/e/policy/17-c_e.html

Do not use names or initials of patients or hospitals and/or hospital telephone numbers especially in illustrative material.

While reporting experiments on animals, indicate whether you adhered to the guidelines of an institution or national research council governing the care and use of laboratory animals.